tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1848362360964404779.post1982339142097844583..comments2024-03-28T03:04:51.580-05:00Comments on Musings of an Old Curmudgeon: Houellebecq and the Death of Europe Jovan-Marya Weismiller, T.O.Carm.http://www.blogger.com/profile/05563666190071708640noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1848362360964404779.post-80667631628557195052019-10-18T08:08:42.418-05:002019-10-18T08:08:42.418-05:00"Some Christians are hostile to Houellebecq a..."Some Christians are hostile to Houellebecq and his works, as his books contain fornication, bestiality, paedophilia, drugginess, and assorted other debaucheries. This is undeniable, but it does not mean that Houellebecq is not on the side of the angels. He is resolutely on the side of human searching and hoping. He tackles great themes—Islam, transhumanism, sexual consumerism, cloning, post-sixties hedonism—but always as a backdrop to his study of the movement of human beings in time and space. He is sometimes misread because his work is the antithesis of political correctness, depicting the world raw and unfiltered."<br /><br />I quite emphatically disagree with this sentiment. One of the most savage and critical of the devil's strategies is precisely to point out his own work, to rub our faces in it, to analyse it for us in gruesome detail, to exaggerate its power in our eyes to drive us to despair. French writers ("realists") of the last 200 years seem especially prone to this form of cooperation with the devil, cynically evaluating his grip on the world and making the reader wallow in its filth. For every reader that Houellebecq's writing leads to repentantance, there'll be a 100 moved further on to despair seeing how all-encompassing the evil seems to be in the poor unbelieving mind of this man. The devil loves this kind of dark admiration of his work, especially when it leads us to scandal, loss of faith, and despair. Novels like these should not be published or promulgated no matter how insightful they might be sociologically. Jackhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13858873453982708283noreply@blogger.com